The philosophical movements of the Twentieth Century included Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Existentialism, Phenomenology, and social and psychological theories that had philosophical implications, such as psychoanalysis and Marxism. But the one I have found the most important philosophical perspective is that of the sociological perspective that developed in mid twentieth century America and Europe that had been based on the earlier generation of American Pragmatism, by Dewey and Nagel, even though the sociologists themselves, such as Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton, were not philosophers but sharp observers and analysts of the social scene. I want to take note of their dominant procedures because they do what all philosophers do, which is to turn ideas about what has to be to go topsy turvy as when they eliminate ideas that are to be regarded as superfluous because they are not necessary ideas, which is the case when Spinoza thought that “justice” and “cause” were unnecessary terms, or thought that terms are to be added as necessary, as when Kant based the idea of free will on the necessary invocation of the word “should” so as to make the world what it is.
This radical idea of sociology is radical not because it has a political philosophy; it is radical because it goes, root and branch, into the basic problem of metaphysics, which is what things or processes have to be, are necessary, and this is so even though sociology, as that is practiced in introductory texts and courses, seem a rather mundane, boring and trivial affair because sociology introduces platitudes that everyone already knows. People follow “norms”, which simply means that people do what they usually do, as if it could be otherwise. People think there is a conflict between racial and ethnic groups because they have different upbringings, have more or less money, and have different histories, but there is no explanation as to how and why there either is or is not an ascription to the general platitude that America is a “systemically racist country”, which politicians and activists voice rather easily, or if that is not the case, everyone either a victim or a victimizer. People also pick up other cliches of sociology, saying that people are enveloped with “bureaucracies”, which simply means that large organizations overwhelm people with their detailed procedures, or are either enamoured or obsessed with “popular culture”, without being sure that what it does is only to preoccupy life with vicarious experiences some of which are trivial and some of them artful, or with “consumerism”, as if there were an alternative to the freedom of engaging in impulse buying in the supermarket or a department store or online.There are better things to study, like accounting or biology. These are about subject matters that you do not already know about and which you can learn from books, while sociology just gives names to what is already familiar, which is a very distinct kind of activity and worth thinking about for its own sake, even if that fact is taken as a way to dismiss sociology rather than look into its very problematic standing as the study of what people already know.
That approach, which is to think of sociology as the study of what is already familiar, is very philosophically profound because it upends the age old Socratic distinction between opinion and truth by insisting on the fact of opinion, that it is everywhere with us, and so has as its subject matter how it is that these opinions are created and what are the dynamics of opinion. Durkheim can be thought of as a major thinker because he indeed turned the tables and took a term which everybody sensed even if not in the forefront of consciousness, that we were subject to norms, to usual behaviors treated as sacrosanct behaviors, and that such facts are self evident even if the processes around them are obscure. Sociology then is a way to examine human consciousness, how the mind of individuals and collectives organized themselves, and its predecessors are Hegal, who saw consciousness unfold in the history of the world and the evolution of the experience of consciousness, and of Marx, who spectacularly objectified consciousness by showing how the material correlates of consciousness create consciousness, a perspective that remains for political radicals even if they no longer read Marx but still have a sense that there can be greater degrees of liberation between one form or another of social oppression. So that is one strand of sociology, whether or not we acknowledge that term.
I want to suggest something very different, even from that singularity upon which sociology could be built. It is that sociology is a point of view that counters the cliches and that suggests a perspective so different from the conventional one that it is mentally liberating not only in that it gets rid of cliches about social life; it is also a way to free oneself from age old perspectives about philosophical concepts so that people are freer in a spiritual as well as a political sense. Sociology is radical not only because it espouses a political predilection or ideology that wants to overturn social institutions, whether of class or of race; rather, sociology is radical because it would point to what Dewey considered the reconstruction of philosophy on pragmatic roots in that usual arguments and concepts were no longer necessary or found to be logical and would develop new questions with which the mind might wrestle. The line goes back to Thomas Malthus, who was one of the first to think of social processes as independent of politics or government and referred instead to one of what many would become so called iron laws about social forces, which in the case of Malthus (correctly or not) claimed that population would overcome the ability of people to create the foodstuffs that allow hunger, disease and, eventually, war. So there is also an iron law of bureaucracy, which suggests that power inevitably rests in the elites of these organizations or Dewey’s view that nurture always prevails over nature in that peoples can overcome their circumstances to become part of the normal population even though, at a given point, a group of people can be thought to be inevitably inferior to another. As sure as people are that there are innate differences, that this is an opinion near universally held at any given time by one group or another, it is also sure that these are overcome, whether by law or other forms of social evolution, as is clearly the case with women and African Americans.
There are four basic insights in mainstream sociology as formulated in the middle of the Twentieth Century that show the way to reason about social events rather than how to explore the nature of consciousness. And these insights apply to metaphysical matters as well as to social events. First, look at consequences rather than causes. It is fruitless to trace out the cause of events in that they are multiply-caused or, more accurately, have multiple contexts within which events occur. So look less at whether the Civil War was caused by slavery or issues concerning states rights and look instead to the consequences of that war, where the South restored itself as a more or less autonomous regin for almost a hundred years after the end of Reconstruction. That shows what the Confederacy cared about: it was the peonage of African Americans.
Here is a social policy that consults consequences rather than causes. At the moment, people are being given benefits so as to get coronavirus vaccines. That is useful to the society at large by moving towards “herd immunity”, which means that so much of the population is immunized so that there are few opportunities for the virus to spread. The consequence is important enough so that governments will offer free hot dogs or baseball tickets or even tickets to a lottery so as to encourage people to get their shots. This has nothing to do with being right or fair. Why should you get a bonus, monetary or otherwise, for doing the right thing? Why are reluctant people to be more rewarded than the people who signed up early on to get their shots? The answer is that consequences count, which is also the reason for engaging in any number of social policies, such as giving people welfare benefits even if some of them will live off these benefits rather than get a job just so that some people who need financial benefits will get them.
Generalize that principle and it becomes a very refreshing but controversial and even non commonsensical view of causation. Rather than thinking of morality as measured against principles, whether in Kant or the Ten Commandments, think of morality as accomplishing whatever proximate purpose that would ensue. You give people welfare so that they have more money regardless of whether they have”earned” the money by having worked for it. It makes sense to have a national park so that some people can enjoy its pleasures rather than because they have a right to use the open spaces. There are no endpoints in morality in that there will be a final goal or rendering whereby people will have justice or a living wage, only a series of problems solved, difficulties overcome, there being no end of issues that arise or that require or suggest some adaptation of policy. People just move on from one problem solved to the next one that turns up.
Raise this issue of a set of endless points from morality to the nature of causation. There is an endless number line where each moment presents a new, final cause (or purpose) for the next moment, the line never ending. The same point also applies when looking at the time number line in the other direction. There is an infinite regress of causes, so that life on Earth is preceded by the evolution of the physical cosmos and “caused” before that by the Big Bang, and that Big Bang caused by something else, perhaps dark holes out of which the Big Bang emerged. There is no need for a first cause, only for an infinite chain of prior causes, just as there is an endless set of subsequent causes, leaving problematic what “cause” means under such circumstances other than the fact that events do succeed other events rather than the application of a set of overarching laws or from a God that does not, for some reason, not need a cause, and so creates the whole of the chain of events that take place. As the old joke says, it is the Earth sitting on a turtle who sits on top of another one all the way down-- or all the way further and back. That’s a very deep consideration that is grounded on the mundane fact that, in social life, consequences explain why something happens.
A second and very deep sociological insight is to treat indicators associated with an object as essential rather than circumstantial. Most philosophers distinguish the essential characteristics of an object, such as shape or size, as necessary ones,, while they treat secondary characteristics as ones that need not be associated with the object, and so whether a tree is white or green or brown is accidental while all trees have barks or sap or a set of roots. But in sociology, it was an insight to identify some indicator of a social entity as significant and used to identify the nature of the object. Whether you live in a particular zip code is an arbitrary designation rather than something essential about you until you realize that a zip code sums up the opportunities people will have in their chances at doing well in life because of the schools and health facilities in the area as well as its rates of crime. The same is true when we treat indicators as offering a basic way of being rather than an accidental juxtaposition of that being. Modern day women treat giving birth as a social cultural practice and so not necessary for being recognized as essentially women, when once those who were barren were regarded as somehow diseased or malformed. Similarly, a voter’s education is an indicator of which party to which the voter will be affiliated, even if not every voter who is Republican will be people without a college education, just as fifty years ago the educated were affiliated with the republicans. Indicators matter even if they change. Wearing a shamrock or a yarmulke is an indication of ethnicity or religion but it is not a certain characteristic and seems superficial and not to the essence of those categories. We manage indicators rather than essences and are on the outlook for handy ones, such as when Erving Goffman said that straightened teeth were an indicator of being middle class. And, if you think about it, the indicator comes very close to being essential rather than circumstantial. Middle class people believe and are driven to reconstructing themselves into becoming better selves and that means buying a better car, having their children get to prestigious universities, and having their teeth straightened. Middle class wives work hard to lose weight. Supposedly superficial indicators are to the heart of the matter. Don’t disregard them because they are obvious.
Apply the significance of indicators to a philosophical problem, in this case, the problem of identity. How do you know whether the person you are dealing with is a consciousness, a person that has internality, even though you can only observe a person’s appearances rather than their consciousness? The Turing Test approached that answer by positing that a test could tell whether a person was a person rather than an intelligent automaton, still bereft of consciousness. I would suggest that there are easier ways to tell the difference between a real person and an automaton by consulting indicators. You would know a person was a person rather than a machine because you could see its lips move because, as I understand it, people have not yet been able to create lips that are lifelike even though people have been able to listen to human voices offered by Alexa and other computers which allow for articulate as well as responsive communications. There might be a time when artificial lips are mastered to imitate human lips, but then we could move on to something else not yet duplicated, and if there is nothing that distinguishes people from machines, no indicator of one that does not do with the other, then you might as well give the automatons the vote, forgetting the problem of Startrek’s Data, who wonders if he has become human because he has morality or emotions or those other deep qualities that make people human. Indicators are enough, and an automaton so perfect might well have evolved into consciousness if all the other attributes, such as soft logic, or empathy, had also become acquired. Problem solved.
The third sociological maxim that also delves deeply into metaphysics is to look at circumstances rather than motives. That is applied in sociology to voting behavior. People, according to Lazarsfeld, thought that looking at demographics rather than looking at ideology would explain how people voted. Poor people voted differently than rich ones, urban differently than rural, educated rather than uneducated. We can update that notion by suggesting that people who vote for what Weber called “charisma” really refers to personalities that engage people because of their social circumstances. People who were angry gravitated towards Trump was because he was angry though it is unclear what Trump supporters were so angry about. Maybe there is always a residue of that circumstance of generalized anger that takes root or maybe it is an expression of animosity against Black and brown people. In any event, there is the need to look to circumstance as an explanation.
A philosophical problem also resolves itself so that it disappears if circumstances are consulted. There is the trolley problem that was invented by Philipa Foot, an English philosopher, in the Sixties. Suppose, while standing at an overpass, you could shift a trolley track so that it would not kill four people rather than one. Would you? The simple matter is that you should follow the utilitarian principle and save more than fewer and so you would do that. But it is a bit more complicated. Passivity might think that was not making a decision and so let the worse result happen. It is about choices. When is a choice really a choice rather than a fact observed? But the inspection of circumstances makes it less a matter of the nature of choice than it is about tastes, and so not really a moral matter at all. Perhaps the single person that was being killed was fat and the person on the overpass didn’t like fat people? That might make a difference, just as if the larger group of people were of different races or included a woman who looked like your ex-wife. There are any number of trivial aspects of the circumstances of these people that would alter the decision, given that the choice is no more difficult than deciding on an impulse purchase at a supermarket. Morality gives way in that, after all, the decision has to be made in a very fast time and so a person can’t ponder who is worth saving or even deciding whether to intrude into the process in the first place..
And the fourth maxim, the fourth feature of the sociological perspective, is to consider actual events rather than hypothetical ones. They always show up if you bother to look. Rather than look for a utopia or a dystopia, look at North Korea. Christopher Hutchins always got a laugh by saying that heaven was like North Korea because Heaven too also wanted everyone to worship the Dear Leader. But the truth of the matter is that idealized or imagined forms of social arrangement have to be based on actual events because otherwise what else can they be but simplifications and distortions of the way places actually are.
This leads to a philosophical radicalism, which is that we can consult only the places that are, find examples of what they are, rather than think sociology is mistaken for focusing only on what has happened to exist rather than what might be. The point is that actual situations and events are privileged in that they have burst out into existence.Rather than look at an idealized market, look for how corporations actually use its wealth to give wealth to stockholders rather than reinvest in manufacturing. You can always find actual examples of social concepts, and if there are no such examples, the principle doesn’t hold. I remember a teenage girl who insisted that she didn’t believe in the dating scene of conventional courtship as the way girls and boys anymore dealt with one another. It was too formal, too constraining, too up tight. But I noticed that when she was going out to meet her friends for drinks, she put on lipstick and a clean pair of jeans. She was dressing up for a date, just differently, without roses or calling at the home of her parents. Same thing, but different, as is also the case when generals send off their soldiers to die in battle, whether David sending a note to allow Uriah to be killed, or Eisenhower meeting with the 81st Airborne Division on the night before D Day. You can always find a detail of dress or conduct or expression which distinguishes some occasion from another.
This fourth sociological insight is also applicable to philosophy. John Rawls tries to give a totally abstract form of the idea of the social contract, a conception basic to English and American philosophy even though sometimes it seems to happen as an assumed or implied event, such as in Hobbes and Locke, or as an actual event, as in Rousseau. Rawls suggests that we imagine all of us living in a preexisting life before we learned what would be our conditions of birth and therefore bereft of what would be our interests in real life. Rather, people would negotiate with one another about what would be the ideal life or Constitution to be set up and so that arrangement, whatever it was, would be a fair and just one. But consider for a moment. What would they have to consider if the pre-existent ones had no social position or wealth or even an inherited set of ideas or even ever had experienced a breath of air or the touch of someone’s cheek? What would they have to discuss? So the idealization of a pre-life without qualities is not a pre-life. It is just nothing, which is the same thing that happens when we imagine a sophisticated view of heaven or the afterlife when there is no longer a belief in clouds and angels and a man with a long beard. That heaven is empty because it has no detail and so the believer is left to say that a dead person is united with God means only that the idea of a person is now similar to the idea of what an idealized person can mean. It is an empty case, just a metaphor for nothing. Sociology doesn’t indulge such metaphors; there are only teenage girls in real life who dress up.